settembre 22, 2016 - Porsche

911 in a car loft

Comunicato Stampa disponibile solo in lingua originale.

The silver #porsche rolls across the sidewalk and into a car lift with bright green lighting at the base of the building. A soft click, a hum, and the car starts ascending to the fifth floor. Here in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg, that would be enough to give it an excellent view of the city. Up on the car loft, Achim Anscheidt parks his #porsche on the loggia and turns to his other baby—a vintage vehicle that he has been restoring for ten years now. It is a Bugatti, a Type 35 from the 1920s. Anscheidt has been tracking down the original parts and fitting them together like a puzzle. It started with the ignition, wheels, and lights. He’s now at 60 percent—the drivetrain is still missing, for instance.

He is a well-known figure in the exclusive DIY community, and people keep an eye out for what is still needed to put the former thoroughbred racing car from Molsheim back into action. His second project is a Porsche 911 SC from 1981 that he restored together with car body maker Willi Thom in a northern neighborhood of Berlin. He stripped it and reduced it right down to the essentials. The car has no back seat, heating system, radio, or paneling. Fabric straps have replaced the door handles. Simple toggle switches operate the lights and wipers.

What Anscheidt finds especially appealing about his #911 is the reduction in form. “It’s been fascinating to dismantle this car a number of times, and to use only the quintessential parts in putting it back together. At some point I also grasped how you can work in targeted ways with lightweight materials to achieve an interesting performance-to-weight ratio,” he remarks. While shaping the Chiron—the fastest, most powerful, and most luxurious series-produced super sports car in the world—as the head of design at Bugatti, he was pursuing a completely different vision with his #porsche#911, which he describes as “back to the basics.” “My idea was to eliminate everything that is superfluous to the dynamics in order to attain an intriguing power-to-weight ratio.